Tony Scott, Hank Kleeman, Kara Hultgreen and the F-14 Tomcat:...

theaviationist ^ | Sep 01 2012 | By David Cenciotti

[US Navy Vet]

...three (tragic) stories and a legendary plane Few days ago, Dario Leone, a long time reader and a huge F-14 Tomcat fan, sent me an email to point out what he had noticed about the date Tony Scott, the famous director of “Top Gun”, chose to commit suicide.

He had observed that Aug. 19 was the 31th anniversary of the day when two F-14s downed two Libyan fighters in 1981 (something that Scott, most probably, didn’t even know) and provided some interesting news about the fate of the two Tomcats involved in the dogfight and their crew members.

“Top Gun is the film that made the F-14 famous all around the world. Downings and crashes aside, aircraft depicted in the movie were true and they were driven by real pilots of the U.S. Navy belonging to VF-51 Screaming Eagles [...] In a certain way, Tony Scott brought on the big screens what had happened on Aug. 19, 1981,” Leone wrote to me.

[CFIIIMEIATP737]

At approach speed you should still be 1.3 times the stall speed. So a yaw at those speeds is not a problem. A common misconception among pilots is a yaw in a stall leads to a spin. That is incorrect. A skid in a stall can lead to a spin. A slip in a stall should not lead to a spin.

[GBA]

Thanks for the background information. How could such a loss be necessary, I wonder, but for some reason we need to keep reinventing reality. Is this new or have humans always had this tendency?

The operational reality is, the front seat of an F-14 is one the absolute pinnacles of aviation's meritocracy.

You earn the position by waging a constant war of skill and competency against the many checks and balances that NEVER stop saying: "You can't do that and if you do, you will die trying." and "How can I kill you today?"

Those checks and balances don't care what PC has to say about much of anything, especially not about how unfair it all is.

Instead, those checks and balances only talk about consequence, and when ignored they usually just say "I told you so" and/or "Rest In Peace".

Such a loss. Could have just said "no" and lived another day, instead of becoming a casualty of the PC war that should never have been fought.

What does Fate write on the tomb of the PC Soldier?
"Here Lies a Casualty of a Lost Cause"

[csvset]

On that day, two F-14A Tomcats belonging to the VF-41 Black Aces and launched from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68 )

I was there, V-2 Div, Waist Cats. Ah, it seems like a lifetime ago.

[Tallguy]

http://a4skyhawk.org/3e/vaq33/vaq33.htm

[rlmorel]

VAQ-133...didn’t you send planes to the JFK?

[rlmorel]

Thanks for your service...:)

[USNBandit]

She had a high, fast, overshooting, wrapped up start. The worst kind of start in carrier aviation. Her correction was to rapidly retard the throttles, which combined with the yaw induced the stall. The TF-30 was prone to stalls, but those conditions wouldn't always produce a stall. She got an unlucky break.

The F-14 community had a habit of flying garbage and writing off stalls as always being pilot induced, when some of those engines needed to be pulled. Don't know the history on her engine. I've seen worse starts and never seen a stall like that.

[USNBandit]

By the time the Tomcat was being phased out half of the fleet was still flying A models with the old engine and old radar. One of my squadrons was decommissioned in the mid 90s and the other one rode the A model until they transitioned to F-18F’s.

[USNBandit]

The TF-30 was so bad that most of use wore “Pratt and Whitney, Dependable Engines” t-shirts as a joke.